TIME Talks with MLK Biographer Taylor Branch

TIME: Was it difficult for you to get people to
talk who were at that time questioning him, to talk about that?

TB: It was difficult to get some people to
talk, just because a lot of people think that the realities of the
movement are so far removed from whatever the myth was, that it's not
worth talking, or that I'm not worth talking to, or whatever, but,
the movement was filled with self-confident men and women to be able
to do what they did, and for most of them, whether it was [black power advocate] Stokely Carmichael or Captain Joseph, Malcolm
X's guy, giving their raw-boned opinions is a trifle compared with
what they had done before. So they were pretty comfortable in their
criticisms of King.

TIME: I was interested in how King continued
to turn to [attorney] Stanley Levison. What was it about
that relationship that seemed to make him so comfortable? What was
the role that Levison filled for him?

TB: I just think that he's somebody that he
always listened to and the thing about King was that he was
comfortable in havingessentially having a circular gunfight with
him in the middle with all these very big egos, yelling and screaming
at one another, and he always wanted Stanley to be part of that, and
he did, it is true, talk to him more than any of the others one-on-one. He would call him and talk to him in private. He had a
confidence that Stanley didn't want anything. He had no ulterior
motives and agendas, and that's something which is very rare, as you
see. You see how much he's different from everybody else, including
[March on Washington coordinator] Bayard Rustin and lots of other
people who are brilliant, brilliant people, but they all have their
own angles, and also Stanley criticized King unvarnished and
straight-on as opposed to in great rhetorical sermons, and that sort
of thing. He would tell him, you know, Martin, I think you're making
a profound error here. Nobody else said things like that.

TIME: One of the things that the book does is
without being sensational, is talk about King's affairs and his
chauvinistic attitude towards women. Was that a difficult decision
to put those things into the book?

TB: Yes. It was difficult how much weight to
give it. But the people who traveled with him were pretty frank.
Martin was a chauvinist. Some of them described it almost just as a
way of simplifying his world. He had to have rules about what kind
of meetings he was having with people, and he tended to want to have
business meetings with the men and social meetings with the women,
although at the same time, he also knew that the movement lived and
breathed on the labor of women.

TIME: If I read the book correctly, the
genesis of the idea for the Poor People's Campaign comes from Marian
Wright [who, under her married name, Marian Wright Edelman,
later became head of the Children's Defense Fund].
TB: Absolutely, and the genesis to go to Selma
comes from Diane Nash. In many respects, Diane was the most unsung
heroine of the whole movement because in earlier times, she was right
up there on the Freedom Ride. She's an innovator in nonviolence, and
King gave her his highest award and I think he recognized her, but at
the same time, she was kind of trampled and lost and neglected, and
not appreciated. He knew that she was doing pioneer things, and that
the women did, but the tradition of pulpit leadership was so male and
that standard, he was just comfortable with that.

TIME: This is hypothetical, but might he have
evolved, become a feminist?

TB: Well, I always think there's hope for
anybody, and the Women's Movementhe was discussing that. I mean
he was talking about it. He recognized it as an issue not only of
politics but of his own mental health toward the end of his life, but
I don't think that he transformed his life.

TIME: His own mental health, meaning?

TB: This is an issuethe way I think of
and treat women is an issue of my own identity and health. Because
he was discussing that. There are little hints of that. But his
life was cut short. There was a transitional time really for
everybody on things that his movement had set in motion. He was cut
down, so we don't know what he would have become privately.

TIME: You've spent two decades working on these
books. What's going to be your next project?

TB: Well, I don't know. I just finished this
one. I know the next thing won't be this long. It's not going to be
another three volumes, but my guess is it's going to grow out of it.
It's been such a profound education for me to live with this for
almost 24 years, that there is a lot there and I hope to wrestle with
some of the themes. Maybe not some of the people, but some of the
ideas in it. But I want to get back to books that only take a year or
two.